“Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten in God’s sight. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.”  Luke 12:6-7

I’m not a faithful podcast listener. Instead, I tend to chance upon individual episodes that catch my attention like shiny pebbles on the beach.

There is one specific episode of Krista Tippett’s On Being that I return to frequently as a kind of therapy for life in the modern world. It’s her interview with journalist Oliver Burkeman concerning his book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. We all have our life hacks, the little rituals or worn bits of wisdom that we swear by. Tippett’s interview with Burkeman is one of mine.

In this interview Burkeman relays his history of attempting to commandeer time—to “get on top of things,” as it were. He describes how he came to see the effort as inherently futile and what he learned by letting it go. I commend the episode to anyone with a philosophical bent and a crippling sense that they’re not doing enough. 

On Burkeman’s telling, our ambition to master time comes down to our difficulty coping with reality—both the truth that our time is minuscule and the fact that we spend it mostly evading the things that really matter to us. We so often recoil from the demand of the moment—whether it’s a challenging conversation or a difficult writing assignment, a wait at the ticket counter or a talkative child. Our drive to control our time, the assumption that with enough orchestration we can master time, our attempts through technological distraction to escape time, these are all ways of coping with the challenge of living at the pace that reality sets for us and according to the demands that meet us unbidden. 

There are many different facets to our struggle with reality, it seems to me.  Time is just one. 

By the time you reach middle age, life can feel like a story made up of details written by someone other than you: The place you didn’t want to live. The job that wasn’t your top choice. The marriage that—by design—cannot offer that thrilling insecurity of a first date. And soon enough your life is colored by battles you never signed up for and obligations that you wouldn’t have chosen for yourself. 

It’s easy to feel the sensation that I’m living in the wrong version of things. That had I only made a couple of hair’s breadth course corrections, the kaleidoscope of my life would have shifted to a constellation of greater vibrancy, in which all my dreams were realized.

I noticed this struggle recently—of all times—when wrestling with a challenging article assignment. It was a topic outside of my usual wheelhouse, a task that I’d accepted upon invitation. Uncomfortable with my own limits, I found myself dragging the assignment out, wishing in vain that I were a different kind of scholar, one who’d read the right books, cultivated different—better—strengths, learned whatever it was I would have needed to know to craft this article to the standard of perfection I demanded from myself. It was the reality of me, in all my annoying finitude, that dissatisfied. 

While distracting myself from the task at hand, I happened to discover Sandra McCracken and Ben Shive’s EP “The Still Point” whose first track is “What is”: 

What could have been 
Missed the only train 
“What should have been” 
We only ask in vain 
What we aim for, we exchange for 
Where we’ve landed. 

I was struck then by the necessity of exchanging the perfect article of my fantasy with an article written by imperfect, limited, me. 

The song continues:

You can open up the present every day 
You can cry for the “one that got away” 
Like the rain at dawn, and the clouds roll on 
Empty handed. 

Here a tradeoff is presented: embracing the present or crying over what could be otherwise. I am struck most of all by the last two lines. The rainclouds give their water to the earth below. They are spent. There’s no withholding. God hasn’t slighted us.

A man once told me cynically that he had solved the riddle of his wife within the first eight weeks of their marriage. I smirked involuntarily. As if it were even possible to understand oneself so well, much less another human being. As if a person ever stayed still long enough to be so discovered. In this case, it seemed so obvious to me that longing for a different reality was an outright rejection of the gift in front of him.  

The final stanza of McCracken’s and Shive’s song is a riff on T. S. Eliot’s poem “Burnt Norton,” from his “Four Quartets”: 

I can see the end of it 
Every vector pointing 
To the wondrous why and when of it 
And all the lines rejoining 
At the still point of the turning world 
Where the past and future gather 
What was and is and is to come 
What is ever after  

The song basks in the beauty of what is, seeing it as a piece with what was and with what will be. Whatever our understanding of free will and contingency, it’s clear that reality is singular and unrepeatable. Fixating on a version of the present that we suppose would have been better is always a disregarding of the gift that is. 

Lent seems to me the perfect time to come to terms with reality. What it comes down to, after all, is the embrace of our mortality. It comes down to acknowledging that we are dust, and, even so, that we are unimaginably loved. We are fragile, finite creatures, with thinning hair and faulty knees. And yet God has numbered those hairs on our head and claimed them as precious. Instead of lamenting that we don’t have that elusive version of ourselves, of our situation, that would have satisfied us, instead of raging against reality, we can accept “what is” as the gift it is. We can acknowledge this time and place as the precious space of God’s claiming us and calling us. 

In recent years, I made my own poetic contribution on this theme (this one inspired both by a philosopher and by my then-toddler son). 

Determinate Negation
After Hegel

This tantrum is brought to you by More rice! 
Not a plea; it’s a demand:
More rice to the still untouched rice heaped there on his plate. 
He gapes at me with flushed face and wet eyes, stung by this betrayal: 
If I loved him, there would be infinite rice—
No need to choose between the having and the eating.

And me? I want the first me and 
the second, and the 67^th.
I do not want to forfeit even one:

The wise path and the reckless way,
a sunlit night and the end of day,  
the safe bet and the risky too,
to start and start again—
to see nothing through, 

time and space 
to bend to my obsession:
a million versions taking turns 
collecting dust in my possession.   

We are learning the contours of things, he and I, 
how each choice narrows the choices after:
To each plate a set number of grains, 
and to each love a solid shape
whose outer edge concludes,
given substance only ever, 
by what it excludes.